The Lost River On the trail of Saraswati

Part 3   F R O M S A R A S VAT Ī T O G A N G Ā ‘From the Neolithic time till almost today there has never been, in spite of spectacular changes in the course of time, a definite gap or break in the history of the subcontinent.’ Jean-François Jarrige ‘A continuous series of cultural developments links the so-called two major phases of urbanization in South Asia . . . The essential of Harappan identity persisted.’ Jim Shaffer

{9} The Tangible Heritage Did the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization, then, vanish without a trace? Very nearly so, if we are to believe many histories of India. In a recent work, Romila Thapar, a noted historian of ancient India, writes that after the collapse of the Indus cities, ‘the material culture shows no continuities’.1 In this perspective, though minor cases of survival might be spotted here and there, the Harappan world completely disintegrated: ‘The civilization did indeed come to an end,’2 as Shereen Ratnagar puts it, stressing ‘the end of the traditions of sculpture, writing, architecture and, presumably, also seafaring’.3 Most of the second millennium BCE would then be a long ‘dark age’, as it has often been called, until urbanism was finally reborn in the Ganges Valley in the first millennium BCE—but urbanism of a kind wholly unrelated to its Harappan antecedent. Some archaeologists have shared this view: A. Ghosh, for instance, wrote in 1973, ‘All the scanty data at present available taken into consideration, the possibility of Harappan urbanism surviving or resuscitating in the upper Ganga basin through the Late Harappan and ochre-coloured ware* sites in the middle of the first millennium BC may be forthwith rejected .. .’4 But Ghosh rested his case mostly on the study of pottery, and data from other fields are no longer so ‘scanty’ as they were in his time. In fact, evidence that has been growing by leaps and bounds during the last few decades has been painting a very different picture. Some archaeologists, such as Possehl, now speak of ‘transformation’5 rather than ‘end’ of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization; in the terminology proposed by Jim Shaffer, the Late Harappan phase (roughly 1900-1300 BCE) is called the

‘Localization Era’, to reflect the splintering of the Harappan tradition into localized forms no longer cohesively held together. In that view, there is no ‘end’, but a series of transitions that reflect both ‘continuity and change’,6 in Kenoyer’s words. Shaffer goes so far as to suggest that the end of Harappan urbanism might itself be something of an illusion: The often stated disappearance of urban centers noted for the Late Harappan [phase] is an assumption7 . . . There is no conclusive archaeological evidence to indicate that large ‘urban’ settlements disappear.8 Far more extensive excavations will alone put this challenging statement to test. What concerns us here is the quantum of continuity: did the Harappan culture fizzle out, or were some of its elements transmitted to the historical developments in the Gangetic region, where India’s classical civilization grew? If it was the latter, were those transmissions of a fragmented, incidental sort (‘disconnected’9 as Ratnagar calls them), or did they form a more substantial body, a significant bridge between the two cultures? This debate has been growing in intensity in recent decades for a reason extraneous to archaeology: scholars who hold that hypothetical Aryans invaded or migrated into the subcontinent towards the middle of the second millennium BCE divide India’s protohistory into the ‘pre-Aryan’ and ‘Aryan’ eras, with the Harappan world falling into the former and the Gangetic into the latter. In this view, these two civilizations, being the creations of different peoples speaking different tongues, using different technologies, and having very different religions and cultures, are perforce separated by a gulf: a ‘Vedic Night’, as it was often called or, in Wheeler’s phrase, a ‘Vedic Dark Age’.10 The Indus civilization is thus seen as brilliant, no doubt, but ephemeral and solitary—an island in space and time: ‘That civilization is not the direct origin of the Indian civilization’,11 writes the French scholar Bernard Sergent, the ‘direct origin’ being the Ganges civilization supposedly created by the recently arrived Vedic Aryans. Between the two is an ‘immense “gap”. . . the historical discontinuity between Harappan India and historical

India’.12 ‘Discontinuity’ is indeed the keyword of the invasionist perspective, which has been the dominant one since the days of Marshall, who was perhaps the first to label the Harappan culture as ‘pre-Aryan’. In 1961, the noted British prehistorian and archaeologist Stuart Piggot, another proponent of the ‘Dark Age’13 concept, affirmed that ‘the long-established [Harappan] cultural traditions of northwestern India were rudely and ruthlessly interrupted by the arrival of new people from the west’.14 A.L. Basham concurred, finding the culture of the incoming Aryans ‘diametrically opposed to its [Harappan] predecessor’.15 The contrast is total, the gap unbridgeable. More recently, the US Sanskritist Michael Witzel, an ardent proponent of the Aryan invasion theory, wrote, ‘The Indo- Aryans, as described in the Rig-Veda, represent something definitely new in the subcontinent. Both their spiritual and much of their material culture are new.’16 Therefore the question before us is: Was the Ganges civilization built upon a legacy from its predecessor (and if so, how much of a legacy), or was it completely unrelated to it as the above scholars assert? Let us begin with the ‘material’ aspect before we move to the ‘spiritual’ in the next chapter. URBANISM AND ARCHITECTURE Excavations of historical urban centres in the Gangetic region have been disappointingly few and limited in extent, with many of them lying buried under modern cities and therefore being largely inaccessible. Even with such limited data, Jim Shaffer17 and the British archaeologist Robin Coningham,18 among other scholars, have highlighted parallels between the Harappan city and its counterpart of later historical times. For instance, both generally had an internal planning based on a grid plan; both had monumental public architecture; both had enclosing fortifications. In a recent study,19 Piotr A. Eltsov went further and proposed that in both cities, fortifications had a symbolic rather than a utilitarian role, standing for authority and segregation; in other words, they played the same part as grandiose palaces, temples or royal burials did in other civilizations (such as

the Egyptian). Eltsov also noted the absence of palaces in the early Gangetic cities20 (to the limited extent of the excavations), which echoes the same absence in the Indus-Sarasvatī cities. A careful, site-by-site analysis of such features led him to squarely place the Harappan and the Gangetic city within the same framework, the origins of which, he suggested, went back to pre- Harappan times: ‘The ethos of the ancient Indian Civilization is shaped during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods.’21 Let us be a little more specific. We have seen fortifications at a number of Harappan sites, from Kalibangan to Dholavira; Mohenjo-daro’s and Harappa’s mounds are also thought to have been fortified. Walled enclosures were of vital importance to the Harappan mind, although a practical usefulness did not seem to be their primary purpose. We find the same situation in historical cities such as Mathura, Kaushambi (both on the Yamuna), Rajghat (near Varanasi), Rajgir, Vaishali (both in Bihar), Shishupalgarh (near Bhubaneswar) and Ujjain (near Indore). The last city’s mud fortifications, for instance, were as wide as 75 m, 14 m high, and ran for some 5 km; it would have taken no less than 4200 labourers toiling for a whole year to erect them! Kaushambi’s 6 km-long rampart of compact clay was about 20 m wide at the base and rose to 9 m; it was strengthened in places by massive revetments of large baked bricks (Fig. 9.1). Shishupalgarh’s rampart was 33 m wide, over 7 m high and formed a perfect square with a perimeter of 4.8 km.22 The fact that so much labour and energy were spent to erect these colossal fortifications in both the Harappan and Gangetic cities strengthens Eltsov’s thesis of a common tradition. Moats often girdle fortifications: we saw one around Banawali, and other Harappan sites are also thought to have had protective moats; they become the norm with most historical cities (for instance, Kaushambi, Rajgir, Shishupalgarh and Ujjain), and are reflected in the meticulous instructions spelt out by Kautilya in his famous treatise on governance, the Arthashāstra, which is usually dated to the age of Chandragupta Maurya in the fourth century BCE.

Parallels can also be found in the layout of streets. Kalibangan had street widths standardized in an arithmetic progression: 1.8 m, 3.6 m, 5.4 m and 7.2 m; we find traces of such a system at Kaushambi as well,23 where a road 2.44 m wide is broadened to the exact double of 4.88 m; more significantly, the Arthashāstra24 prescribes streets in widths of two, four or eight dandas, with the danda being a unit of length generally taken to be about six feet or 1.8 m. More than the actual values, this concern for standardization appears to have Harappan roots (we saw it in the brick ratios, too, and will soon see it in the system of weights). We marvelled at the garbage bins along the streets of Indus cities, and find them again at Taxila’s Bhir Mound, for instance.25 As regards the splendid Harappan drainage system, it is true that nothing so systematic or extensive has so far been unearthed from historical cities, but that could be partly due to the limited nature of the excavations; even then, drains of baked bricks, sometimes as part of sewerage systems, did emerge at Taxila,26 Hastinapura, Kaushambi, Mathura and other sites. Town planning apart, the structures also exhibit continuity. Pillared halls are a case in point: at Mohenjo-daro, a hall with four rows of five pillars each finds an echo in distant Pataliputra (today’s Patna), where a large hall with eight rows of ten pillars overlooks an ancient canal.27 The common ratio (5:4 and 10:8) is intriguing to say the least, and hard to ascribe to mere coincidence. We noted (Fig. 7.2) the unique shape of Banawali’s apsidal temple; it finds a parallel in Atranjikhera28 (some 90 km northeast of Agra), where an apsidal temple is dated around 200 BCE (Fig. 9.2). Roughly 8 x 6.5 m in size, it is about one and a half times larger than Banawali’s structure, but of similar proportions, with the only difference being the square platform at its centre, where the worshipped deity probably stood. Coming to the Harappan house, it has often been shown how it follows a few specific plans, generally based on a central yard with rooms on three sides and a wide entrance on the fourth—a general layout which persisted in historical sites (such as Bhita near Allahabad) and is still found in many

parts of today’s rural India. In fact, in a detailed study, Anna Sarcina demonstrated in 1979 the similarity of house plans at Mohenjo-daro with those in modern Gujarat.29 Construction techniques also survived. B.B. Lal documented a few:30 for instance, a peculiar mixture of terracotta nodules and charcoal was found not only in the flooring of Kalibangan houses, but also in those of neighbouring villages 4500 years later; its ability to keep insects and dampness away is doubtless the reason for the persistence of this tradition. At Pirak, Jarrige (whom we met as the excavator of Mehrgarh) and his colleagues were ‘very struck’ by a pattern of ‘four levels of niches symmetrically arranged all along the walls’, and even more struck when they found an identical pattern of niches in the houses of nearby Hindu quarters that had been abandoned at the time of Partition—3000 years after their Harappan predecessors.31 The trademark Harappan well, built with trapezoid bricks (see Fig. 5.5), did not disappear either; it has come to light at quite a few historical sites, even in the south.32 Huge soak jars of terracotta also remained in use in post- Harappan times.33 Taken together, the above traits establish that despite significant differences, urban developments in the Indus-Sarasvatī and Ganges regions do belong to ‘a single Indo-Gangetic cultural tradition which can be traced for millennia’; in the words of Jim Shaffer, ‘a continuous series of cultural developments links the so-called two major phases of urbanization in South Asia’, the Harappan and the historical. His conclusion is plain: ‘the essential of Harappan identity persisted’.34 I must, therefore, disagree with Shereen Ratnagar’s assertion, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that the Harappan architectural tradition disappeared; the above examples demonstrate that quite a few of its aspects survived, even if new styles and structures did appear in the Gangetic plains. THE CODE BEHIND DHOLAVIRA An unexpected case of continuity in the urban field emerges from Dholavira in the Rann of Kachchh. As we noticed when we visited the extraordinary

site (Fig. 7.8), this city presents us with a unique town plan. Looking at it, US astrophysicist J. McKim Malville was impressed by ‘the apparent intent . . . to interweave, by means of geometry, the microcosm and the macrocosm’.35 But how did this ‘interweaving’ actually work? When the excavator, R.S. Bisht, measured the city’s fortifications36 (Table 9.1), something odd alerted him: he found that the various enclosures respected specific proportions rather than random ones (we have noted often enough the Harappans’ love for precise ratios). The overall city’s proportions (771 x 617 m) are very precisely in the ratio 5: 4 (that is, the length is five-fourths of the width, or 1.25 times the width, or again 25 per cent longer than the width). As if to make it clear that this is not the mere play of chance, Dholavira’s planners applied the same ratio to the castle’s dimensions, both inner and outer. In fact, just before the Mature phase, the castle, which was the earliest part of the city, had slightly different proportions: it was subjected to alterations so as to bring its dimensions in line with the desired proportions—one more clue that they were consciously chosen. Table 9.1. Dholavira’s principal dimensions (rounded off to the nearest metre). Dimension Measurement (in metres)   Lower town (entire city) Length Width Middle town Ceremonial ground 771 617 Castle (inner) Castle (outer) 341 290 Bailey 283 47 114 92 151 118 120 120 Table 9.2. Main ratios at work at Dholavira, with margins of error.

Dimensions Ratio Margin of Error (%) Castle, inner* 5:4 0.9 Castle, outer* 5:4 2.4 Bailey* 1:1 0.0 Middle town* 7:6 0.5 Ceremonial ground* 6:1 0.7 Lower town (entire city)* 5:4 0.0 Castle’s outer to inner lengths† 4:3 0.7 Middle town’s length to castle’s inner length† 3:1 0.4 Middle town’s length to castle’s outer length† 9:4 0.2 City’s length to middle town’s length† 9:4 0.6 Middle town’s length to 6:5 0.3 ceremonial ground’s length†     * proposed by R.S. Bisht † proposed by Michel Danino The middle town (340 x 290 m) has proportions in the ratio 7:6 (in other words, its length is seven-sixths of the width, or 16.7 per cent longer). The long ceremonial ground, which runs alongside the northern sides of the castle and the bailey, reflects a precise ratio of 6:1. There are a few more ratios at work (Fig. 9.3 and Table 9.2), the most important of which is 9:4 (or 2.25): as I found in my study of Dholavira’s geometry,37 it is not only the ratio of the middle town’s length to the castle’s length, but also of the overall city’s length to the middle town’s length. Such a precise repetition, again, discounts the possibility of chance. Moreover, the average margin of error of Dholavira’s major ratios (Table 9.2) is just 0.6 per cent—a remarkable degree of precision, given the irregularities of the terrain and dimensions running into hundreds of metres. Looking beyond Dholavira, I found similar ratios at work at other sites too.38 For instance, the ratio 5:4 happens to reflect the proportions of Lothal (whose overall dimensions are 280 x 225 m), of Harappa’s ‘granary’, a huge building measuring 50 x 40 m, and of a major building in Mohenjo-daro’s

‘HR’ area measuring 18.9 x 15.2 m. I could not help noting that the ‘assembly hall’, also called ‘pillared hall’, located on the southern part of the acropolis, had four rows of five pillars each (5 x 4), while its dimensions (about 23 x 27 m) were in the ratio 7:6, thus reflecting Dholavira’s main two ratios! Or, if we look at the ratio 9:4, we find it at Mohenjo-daro again in a long building located just north of the Great Bath, which measures 56.4 x 25 m. (Other ratios clearly identifiable at Mohenjo-daro’s acropolis include 3:1, 3:2, 7:4 and 7:5.) The emerging pattern is that when it came to fortifications and major buildings, rather than leave it to chance or circumstance, Harappans preferred to follow specific ratios, which they must have regarded as particularly auspicious. Their motives may have been aesthetical or religious, or both—perhaps also cosmological, as Mckim Malville proposed. Whatever they were, we find the same love for ratios in much of Sanskrit literature, and sometimes the very same ratios. Take the case of Dholavira’s main ratio, 5:4. The Shatapatha Brāhmana describes the trapezoidal sacrificial ground,39 the mahāvedi (No. 1 in Fig. 9.4), where the fire altars are placed: its western side is thirty steps long while the shorter eastern side is twenty-four steps—a proportion of 1.25 or 5:4. A few centuries later, India’s most ancient texts of geometry, the Shulbasūtras, giving minute instructions on the construction of multi-layered altars, repeat the same proportions for the mahāvedi but in terms of precise linear units rather than steps.40 We find the ratio 5:4 again a millennium later, prescribed in various traditions of Vāstushāstra, the Indian science of architecture. Thus, in his encyclopaedic Brihat Samhitā, Varāhamihira states that for a ‘king’s palace . . . [the] length is greater than the breadth by a quarter’.41 In other words, the length is equal to the width plus one-fourth of the width—that is, five- fourths of the width, or 5:4, as with Dholavira’s city and castle enclosures. Should we be tempted to dismiss this as a coincidence, Varāhamihira states in the very next verse that in the case of the house of a commanderin-chief ‘[the] length exceeds the width by a sixth’,42 that is to say, seven-sixths or 7: 6—the same proportion as Dholavira’s middle town!

It was in fact this double identity between Dholavira’s two main ratios and those of Varāhamihira three millennia later that drew my attention to Dholavira’s geometry: it would have been more ‘practical’ for the Dholavirian engineers to plan the city’s enclosures as perfect squares; that they chose to depart from this more utilitarian shape and build rectangular enclosures according to specific proportions betrays a clear intent, probably the same as Varāhamihira’s in the Brihat Samhitā : a desire to embed auspiciousness in the town plan. We have here a continuity not just between Harappan and classical town planning, but between the Harappan and Vedic concepts. But then, Dholavira’s planners could not have translated such ratios onto the land without some defined unit of length, just as we would today use the metre. Here we come to a straightforward mathematical problem: given all the ratios at play and the known dimensions, can we work out the unit of length used to measure the city’s enclosures? I proposed a simple method to do just that,43 and calculated that the unit of length yielding the simplest results was 1.9 m. Expressed in terms of such a unit, all the city’s dimensions took on unexpectedly felicitous expressions (Fig. 9.5); the average margin of error with respect to the actual dimensions was a negligible 0.6 per cent. Applying the same unit to structures at other Harappan sites gave striking results.44 Fig. 9.6 summarizes the ratios and measurements found in the major buildings of Mohenjo-daro’s acropolis, but such whole multiples of Dholavira’s unit appeared elsewhere too, for instance at Harappa, Kalibangan and Lothal. There is more to say about the unit of 1.9 m, but we must first take a leap into historical times and pay a brief visit to Dholavira’s ‘twin city’. FROM DHOLAVIRA TO KĀMPILYA In the 1990s, while Dholavira was being excavated in the Rann of Kachchh by R.S. Bisht and his team, an Italian team led by the Indologist Gian

Giuseppe Filippi visited the sleepy village of Kampil in the Farrukhabad district of Uttar Pradesh in the mid-Ganges Valley. A. Cunningham had probably been the first to propose, in 1878, that this was the Mahābhārata’s Kāmpilya, the capital of South Pāñchāla, whose king was Drupada, the father of Draupadī; several Indian archaeologists followed suit. But five kilometres away from the village, the Italian team found a rectangular settlement of 780 x 660 m with remains of fortifications enclosing the city and following the cardinal directions; the place is called ‘Drupad Kila’ by the local villagers, in one more association with the epic. Substantial excavations have not yet been carried out, but judging from potsherds, baked bricks and other artefacts, the site goes back several centuries BCE. Irrespective of Drupad Kila’s association with the Mahābhārata, when G.G. Filippi presented its discovery to R.S. Bisht in January 1998 (when the latter was Director of Excavations with the Archaeological Survey of India), he was ‘surprised to find that the dimensions and the orientation of the Drupad Kila coincided exactly with those of Dholavira’.45† But then, in Filippi’s words: The problem is that Dholavira was a town of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization, 2,000 years older than Kāmpilya. This fact offered evidence of the continuity of only one urban model from the Indus-Sarasvatī to the Ganges civilizations in the time frame of two millennia.46 Filippi was therefore convinced that his team’s discovery provided ‘important support to the theory of continuity’47 between the two civilizations and militated against the old ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’.48 Pending excavations, Drupad Kila provides one more link between India’s two urban phases. Let us turn to a few others. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES The standardized Harappan system of weights greatly impressed the early excavators: it was ‘unique in the ancient world’.49 Shaped as cubes or truncated spheres, made of chert or semi-precious stone, the weights start

below a gram and stop over 10 kg, with some 14 stages in between. Taking the smallest weight (about 0.86 g) as a unit, a first series grows geometrically, with the next weight being twice that unit, the next twice again, etc.; to be precise, the series runs 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. The fifth weight in the series, 13.6 g, is the most common in the archaeological record. Then, instead of going on doubling the weights (which would give 128, 256 and so on), the series switches to multiples of the lower weights: we thus have 160 units, followed by 200, 320, 640, 1600, 3200, 6400, 8000 and, finally, 12,800. Such a double series is also at the root of the weight system described in the Arthashāstra, as Indian metrologist V.B. Mainkar highlighted, who in addition showed that the actual weights described there in terms of a tiny seed called gunja precisely match their Harappan counterparts.50 The match is not just textual but historical too: towards the middle of the first millennium BCE, coins made of silver began to be issued in the Indo- Gangetic region, each bearing several punch marks depicting various motifs. Carefully weighing thousands of these punch-marked coins, from Taxila in particular, the historian-cum-mathematician D.D. Kosambi noted in 1941 how there was ‘every likelihood of the earlier Taxila hoard being weighed on much the same kind of balances and by much the same sort of weights, as at Mohenjo-daro some two thousand years earlier’.51 The British Indologist John E. Mitchiner52 went a step further and established correlations between the traditional system of weights used in India till recent decades and Harappan weights (Table 9.3), with a difference smaller than 1.8 per cent. Such a close match between the two systems is beyond the realm of coincidence. Indeed, the survival of the Harappan weight system in different forms is one of the clearest cases of continuity with classical India. Although some scholars, such as R.S. Sharma, chose to see in it nothing but ‘accidental similarities’,53 most archaeologists have accepted it. ‘The Indus weight system is identical to that used in the first kingdoms of the Gangetic plains . . . and is still in use today in traditional markets throughout Pakistan and India,’ writes Kenoyer.54 (Of course, this is no longer quite true for India

because of the widespread adoption of the metric standard, but elderly Indians will understand what he had in mind.) Table 9.3. Mitchiner’s comparison between Harappan and traditional weights : the match is almost perfect. Harappan Weights Unity 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 1.705 3.41 6.82 13.64 27.28 54.56 Value in grams 0.8525 512 Traditional Indian Weights   53.60 ‘Rattis’ 8 16 32 64 128 256 2 4 8 16   ‘Karshas’ 1 1.675 3.35 6.70 13.40 26.80 Value in grams 0.8375 Do we find such a survival in the field of linear measures? The answer is admittedly less straightforward. The clearest connection, proposed by Mainkar again, rested on a piece of ivory found by S.R. Rao at Lothal, which bore twenty-seven slightly irregular graduation lines spanning 46 mm. This points to an average unit of 1.77 mm, and Mainkar proposed that this unit was precisely one-tenth of the traditional angula described in Kautilya’s Arthashāstra.55 Defined as the maximum width of the middle finger, or as eight grains of barley placed width-wise next to each other, the angula (literally ‘finger’) is the Indian equivalent of the digit found in civilizations as far apart as Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece, Japan or the Roman Empire, where it varied from 1.6 to 1.9 cm. Early scholars attributed the last value to the Indian angula, but that was mainly because it amounted to a convenient 3/4 inch; more precise estimations by Mainkar and his colleague L. Raju56 led them to a value of 1.78 cm. Naturally enough, Mainkar suggested that this was very close to ten divisions of the Lothal scale (1.77 cm), a view tentatively accepted by the historian of Indian science Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya.57 Three other scale-like objects have come to light in the Harappan cities so far. The first, discovered by Ernest Mackay in his 1930-31 season at

Mohenjo-daro, was a broken piece of shell bearing eight divisions of precisely 6.7056 mm each, with a dot and a circle five graduations apart, which suggests a decimal system. However, attempts by Mackay, its discoverer, to relate such a unit to dimensions in Mohenjo-daro were, by his own admission, not very successful, and he suspected the existence ‘of a second system of measurement’.58 The second scale, found at Harappa, was a piece of bronze rod with four graduation lines at an interval of 9.34 mm; nothing much could be made out of it. Finally in the 1960s, a rough 9 cm- long piece of terracotta with what seemed to be graduation lines came to light at Kalibangan; it remained half-forgotten until R. Balasubramaniam, an expert in metallurgy, noted for his work on the Delhi Iron Pillar, recently examined it: he found a unit of 1.75 cm to make perfect sense of the graduations.59 This establishes not only a close connection with the Lothal unit of 1.77 mm, but also a direct link with the Arthashāstra’s angula. The latter link is a powerful one, as Balasubramaniam showed in addition that most divisions on the terracotta scale were one-eighth of 1.75 cm, and we have just seen that one of the two definitions given for the angula in the Arthashāstra is based on eight grains of barley—each grain being therefore one-eighth of an angula. The Kalibangan scale, rough though it may be, provides a direct connection with linear measures of the historical era. Can we get an independent confirmation of this important claim? I propose that we can. I referred earlier to a unit of 1.9 m which, according to my calculations, is at the root of Dholavira’s town planning; if we take an average angula of 1.76 cm between the Lothal and the Kalibangan scales, we find that Dholavira’s unit is precisely 108 times that measurement: 190 ≈ 108 x 1.76 (the margin of error is a microscopic 0.04 per cent). Now, it so happens that the Arthashāstra lists several units of length besides the angula; one of them is the dhanus (or ‘bow’), which is defined thus: ‘108 angulas make a dhanus, a measure [used] for roads and city-walls . . .’60 The parallel between the Arthashāstra’s dhanus of 108 angulas and Dholavira’s unit of 108 times the Lothal-Kalibangan angula seems too striking to be a mere coincidence, especially when the Arthashāstra specifies that the dhanus is to

be used ‘for roads and city-walls’. This naturally suggests that the angula- dhanus system is of Harappan origin. Moreover, from the humble baked brick to doorways, many dimensions can be expressed neatly in terms of an angula of 1.76 cm, as I showed recently.61 There is nothing surprising about a Harappan angula of 1.76 cm, since, as I mentioned earlier, it falls within the range of the traditional digit in other cultures (1.6-1.9 cm). But why create a unit of 108 rather than 100 angulas when the Harappans, as their system of weight demonstrates, commonly used multiples of ten? Varāhamihira gives us a clue in his Brihat Samhitā62 when he states that the height of a tall man is 108 angulas, that of a medium man ninety-six angulas, and that of a short man eighty-four angulas (the same heights apply to statues of various deities63); using our Harappan angula of 1.76 cm, we get 1.90, 1.69 and 1.48 m respectively, quite consistent with ‘tall’, ‘medium’ and ‘short’. This pragmatic definition based on the human body makes sense: the Harappan dhanus is the height of a tall man. Astronomical considerations may also have however played a part: 108 happens to be the distance between the sun and the earth in terms of the sun’s diameter, as the Indologist and scientist Subhash Kak pointed out.64 Although this statement may sound too sophisticated for the protohistoric age, in reality it takes no more than a stick to verify it (Fig. 9.7): view the standing stick at a distance equal to 108 times its length and you will see it exactly as large as the sun or the moon (in mathematical language: its apparent height will be the exact apparent diameter of the sun or the moon). Such an observation would have been well within the Harappans’ competence: the Finnish scholar Erkka Maula, studying small drilled holes on ring stones found at Mohenjo-daro,65 demonstrated that, like their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Harappans devoted considerable attention to tracking the sun’s path through the year—the only way to plan the next sowing or, perhaps, prepare for a festival coinciding with the spring equinox.

Whatever the exact origin of number 108 may be (and it is sacred in many traditions from Japan to ancient Greece to northern Europe), its long tradition in classical Hinduism (108 Upanishads, dance postures, rosary beads . . .) does seem to have Harappan roots. As regards the dhanus of 1.9 m, which I calculated at Dholavira, R. Balasubramaniam showed in a recent study66 that in combination with an angula of 1.76 cm, it expressed all the dimensions of the Delhi Iron Pillar with unexpected harmony (Fig. 9.8): the pillar’s total length of 7.67 m, for instance, is precisely four dhanus; the pillar’s diameter, thirty-six angulas at the bottom, shrinks to twenty-four angulas at ground level, finally to taper off at twelve angulas at the very top. If this were not enough, the ratio between the pillar’s entire length (7.67 m) and the portion above the ground (6.12 m) is 5:4, verified to 0.2 per cent—again, Dholavira’s master ratio! This bears out what we have already concluded from the texts : Harappan ratios and linear units survived the collapse of the Indus cities and passed on to those of the Ganges Valley. This survival found one more compelling confirmation in recent original research conducted by two architects, Indian Mohan Pant and Japanese Shuji Funo.67 Their starting point was Thimi, a town east of Kathmandu that has existed for some fifteen centuries or more. Measuring blocks defined by a succession of regularly spaced east-west streets, they found an average width of 38.42 m; besides, a pattern of divisions on a long nearby strip of fields yielded an average of 38.48 m: why the same average, and what did this number mean? Pant and Funo then jumped a millennium back into the past and turned their attention to the highly regular street pattern at Sirkap, one of Taxila’s three mounds, excavated by Marshall over many years (Fig. 9.9). A detailed study of Marshall’s plan established that the average distance between parallel streets was—38.4 m! Moreover, on the nearby Bhir mound, also excavated by Marshall, they found ‘a number of blocks [of houses] in contiguity with a width of 19.2 m’,68 which is, of course, just half of 38.4 m.

Pant and Funo, trying to make sense of such regular patterns, were led to correlate these dimensions with the Arthashāstra system of linear measures: they adopted a danda (‘stick’ or ‘rod’, a synonym for the dhanus69) of 108 angulas, and, as prescribed by the text, a rajju (or ‘rope’) of ten dandas and a paridesha of two rajjus. Their danda had a value of 1.92 m, so that the block dimensions of 19.2 m were equivalent to 1 rajju, and those of 38.4 m became a neat one paridesha. At the other end of the scale, the value of the angula was 1.78 cm (1.92 m divided by 108). These results, which I was unaware of when I researched Dholavira’s system of units, are very nearly identical to the values I calculated there (1.9 m, 1.76 cm). It is extraordinary that Pant and Funo’s work, proceeding from completely independent methods, led them to adopt exactly the same system as the one I worked out at Dholavira, and with almost exactly the same values for the basic units. Pant and Funo did not stop at historical cities: they travelled back in time once more and studied Mohenjo-daro’s plan.70 In three different parts of the city, they found that the dimension which frequently occurs in major cluster blocks is 19.20 m—in other words, one rajju again—and also smaller grids of 9.6 m (5 dandas or dhanus). Their conclusion was straightforward: There is continuity in the survey and planning tradition from Mohenjodaro to Sirkap and Thimi . . . The planning modules employed in the Indus city of Mohenjodaro, Sirkap of Gandhara, and Thimi of Kathmandu Valley are the same.71 This continuity is the most eloquent example of the Harappan legacy in the field of town planning and linear measures. TECHNOLOGY AND CRAFTS Let us briefly turn to other fields. Almost every Harappan technology and craft speaks of continuity. Thus the ingenious bronze casting method known as ‘lost wax casting’, used to cast the figurine of the ‘dancing girl’, for instance, continued to be used later and spread throughout the subcontinent;72 traditional communities of bronze casters using just the same

technique can still be found, as at Swamimalai in Tamil Nadu. As regards craft techniques, Dales, Kenoyer, Rao, Lal and several other archaeologists have documented how, from bangle-making to bead-making, from the working of shell to that of ivory, today’s traditional craftsmen often perpetuate Harappan techniques, even if they integrate new materials or new styles. In order to produce blue glazed ceramics, some of them use the same copper oxide pigments as did the Harappans; they drill, bleach and colour long semiprecious beads in the same manner. In fact, when archaeologists want to understand Harappan techniques, they often look around and consult today’s traditional craftsmen—a case in point being today’s bead industry of Khambat, at the top of the gulf of the same name, some 30 km away from Lothal.73 Techniques apart, many objects of daily use have survived with hardly any change, as B.B. Lal illustrated recently74—be it toiletry articles, the frying pan, the humble kamandalu (a small water pot with a handle), or the wooden writing tablet, the takhti.75 Games too : much like their Harappan predecessors, children of north India still play (or used to play till recently) with rattles, whistles, spinning tops and flat pottery disks; toy carts, crafted by Harappans to keep their children amused, were frequently unearthed in the Ganges cities. As regards the Indus dice (Fig. 9.10), they could easily be confused for the modern ones (except for a different arrangement of the dots). Harappans apparently loved board games, and the set of terracotta pieces found at Lothal (Fig. 5.10) does evoke the modern game of chess, as S.R. Rao pointed out, or at least an ancestor of it. Ornaments provide us with arresting cases of survival : the omnipresent bangle to start with, which Indian women have remained as fond of as their Harappan forerunners; even the manner of wearing it—fully over the left arm, for instance, as with the ‘dancing girl’—can still be seen in the rural and tribal parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Anklets76 (Fig. 9.11) and nose or ear studs,77 documented at Mohenjo-daro and other sites, of course constitute an integral part of the finery of today’s Indian woman. Even the married Hindu woman’s custom of applying vermilion at the parting of the

hair has Harappan origins: figurines found at Nausharo and elsewhere show traces of red pigment at the same spot.78 Some orthodox Hindu men continue to wear an amulet tied to the upper right arm, exactly where the so- called ‘priest-king’, whom we shall meet presently (Fig. 10.18), displays one; or sometimes they apply sacred ashes or sandalwood paste at the same spot. Harappan agriculture was heavily dependent on the ox cart, whose shape remained virtually unchanged till recent times, judging from the many small- scale toy models; even its wheelbase, measured from cart tracks found at Harappa, is the same as that of today’s cart.79 Fields were ploughed, and a terracotta model of ploughshare found at Banawali would arouse little surprise in the peasant of today. We noted earlier that (Fig. 5.9) Kalibangan’s fields were ploughed with a double network of perpendicular furrows; when the excavators tried to understand the reason behind this peculiar arrangement, they turned to the nearby village of Kalibangan and saw peasants ploughing their fields in exactly the same manner—almost 5000 years later! As regards navigation, three representations of boats have survived, but none of those of seafaring ships. The depictions (Fig. 9.12) at least show that the boats plying on the Indus in Harappan times had the same shape as today’s traditional Sindhi boat: raised sides and a high central cabin.80 From the very beginning of their explorations, archaeologists have frequently stressed more such revealing cases of material survival of the Harappan civilization, though they may have sought to explain them in different ways. We may sum up with Kenoyer: There appear to be many continuities [between the Indus and later historical cultures]. Agricultural and pastoral subsistence strategies continue, pottery manufacture does not change radically, many ornaments and luxury items continue to be produced using the same technology and styles . . . There is really no Dark Age isolating the protohistoric period from the historic period.81

Such is the positive verdict of archaeology. It does not mean that there was no change in the post-Harappan age—that would be impossible, given the upheaval that the collapse of the urban order must have caused. The civic administration certainly disintegrated, the standardized brick sizes were gradually abandoned or altered, and long-distance trade and the Indus seals disappeared. But one oft-quoted disappearance—that of the Harappan writing system— may have been exaggerated, and it is worth probing the case of the vanishing script. THE INDUS SCRIPT This writing system remains the most exasperating riddle of this civilization: over 4200 inscriptions, most of them on seals, tablets or pottery, made up of about 400 signs, only 200 of which are used more than five times. Some of these signs appear on pottery a few centuries before the urban phase,82 but generally in isolation. In the present state of our knowledge, the full-fledged script appears to be born with the cities, and fades away with them. Well over a hundred candidates—from the most serious experts to a colourful crowd of self-styled decipherers—have offered their key at the feet of this sphinx, which has, however, remained stubbornly mute. Why so many worshippers? Because of the cruel absence, so far, of any bilingual inscription, such as the famous Rosetta stone that enabled Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Also because the inscriptions are so short: five to six signs on an average (twenty-six for the longest, with many seals having just a sign or two)—such brevity appears to exclude full sentences and makes verification virtually impossible. Basing themselves on similarities in the shapes of signs, scholars have compared the Indus script with the Sumerian, proto-Elamite, Old Semitic and Etruscan scripts—even with the Rongo-Rongo signs of Easter Island! Some have read names of godheads, names of kings, cities or regions, while others have opted for administrative titles, communities or clans, goods, metals, agricultural produce, or just numbers. Most would-be decipherers

have tried to read a reconstructed ‘proto-Dravidian’ into the script, although serious attempts based on Sanskritic readings have not been lacking. In the end, the only safe statement is that the seals played an important part in trade, and permitted the identification of either traders or their goods. Once the Indus script disappears, around 1800 BCE, we have to wait until the fifth century BCE for the first historical script—Brāhmī—to appear in a developed form.83 Brāhmī is the mother of all Indian scripts (and several Southeast Asian ones), but since the nineteenth century, the majority of scholars have regarded it as deriving from, or inspired by, a Semitic script (with Aramaic being the one most often suggested of late). This view, which ultimately remains speculative, may have prevented a serious study of candidates for a possible transmission of the Indus writing tradition to historical times, a few examples of which are intriguing, at the very least (Fig. 9.14). The first comes to us from Bet-Dwarka, an island near the northwestern tip of Saurashtra; named after the nearby mainland town of Dwarka, it is traditionally associated with Krishna. At Bet-Dwarka, Late Harappan antiquities have been identified and dated between the nineteenth and fourteenth centuries BCE.84 Two potsherds bearing inscriptions have come to light, one of which is in a script evidently akin to the Indus script but evolving towards simplified shapes.85 It drew the attention of Indian epigraphists, but whether or not it constitutes a ‘missing link’ must remain in suspense until more similar finds come to light. In the same category, the mysterious inscription in the Vikramkhol cave (in Orissa), some 10 m long and 2 m high, was studied by the eminent epigraphist K.P. Jayaswal, who concluded in 1933 : ‘The Vikramkhol inscription supplies a link [in] the passage of letter-forms from the Mohenjodaro script to Brahmi.’86 This inscription does not appear to have received the attention it deserves, although several epigraphists have used it to argue in favour of an indigenous origin for the Brāhmī script.

Daimabad, a Late Harappan site of the Godavari Valley in Maharashtra, shot into prominence in 1974 with the chance discovery of an unparalleled hoard of massive bronze sculptures weighing 65 kg altogether and consisting of an elephant, a rhinoceros, a buffalo and a standing man driving a light chariot pulled by a pair of bulls. The exact date and provenance of these beautifully crafted sculptures have remained a matter of debate in the archaeological world, but of interest to us here is the find, documented in Late Harappan levels, of button seals and a few potsherds bearing Indus-like signs.87 Again, such finds have not been systematically studied in terms of a possible post-urban evolution of the script. Very different is the case of a grey, round terracotta seal found at Vaishali (Bihar), which clearly bears three ‘classical’ Indus signs, two of them slightly simplified.88 But as it happens, this early historical site is a thousand kilometres east of the Harappan homeland and over a thousand years apart! Not only the signs but their very sequence is typically Harappan; as the epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan put it, ‘Had [the seal] been found at Harappa, it would not have attracted special attention.’89 The normal implication would be that around 600 BCE or so (Vaishali’s earliest levels), elements of the Harappan script were in use in the central Ganges Valley— which, of course, runs counter to all received wisdom in the field. Vaishali’s seal therefore represents a riddle—or perhaps a tantalizing clue that all is not well with the accepted disappearance of the Indus script. Only more extensive excavations of sites of the same period can throw light on this (let me repeat that most digs in the Ganges Valley have been very limited horizontally). A different approach takes us a little farther. We just saw how the punch- marked coins of the early historical era reflected the Harappan standards of weight. But the connection between the two systems appears to run deeper.‡ In 1935, the archaeologist C.L. Fabri pointed to odd parallels between depictions of animal motifs on the coins and on Indus seals (Fig. 9.15): While going through the signs [on the punch-marked coins], I was immediately struck by certain animal representations. The most frequent ones are those of the humped Indian bull, the elephant, the tiger, the

crocodile, and the hare. Now all these animals occur also on the seals of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Not only are the subjects similar, but there are similarities in such small details that one must necessarily suppose that they are not due to mere chance or to ‘similar working of the human mind.’90 Fabri went on to describe those ‘small details’: for instance, in both cases the crocodile holds a fish that seems to hang in front of its jaws; the bull has a manger in front of it; a typical Harappan motif of a single-horned bull (or unicorn) facing a ritual stand (Fig. 10.14) appears generally preserved (except that the bull now has two horns); and in both cases, all animals face right. Fabri added a comparison of Indus signs with symbols on the punch- marked coins, bringing out striking parallels between the two, some of which are reproduced in Fig. 9.16. Overall, Fabri’s conclusion was: We are able to recognize a large number of Indus script pictograms among the punch- marks published by previous writers—too large a number, indeed, to ascribe it to mere coincidence.91 The eminent Vedicist Jan Gonda found that ‘the sum total of [Fabri’s] comparisons is indeed impressive’.92 More recently, the numismatist Savita Sharma, partly building on Fabri’s work, drew a long list of eighty symbols on the punch-marked coins which almost exactly paralleled Indus signs.93 If, as has often been pointed out, simple geometric designs can be expected to be common to many scripts, parallels between more complex shapes, such as the ones illustrated in Fig. 9.17, appear, once again, well beyond the play of chance. A third and more ambitious approach seeks to directly bridge the gap between the two scripts. Among the very first scholars who dared to grasp the nettle, Stephen Langdon94 and G.R. Hunter95 independently proposed in the early 1930s, parallels between the signs of these two systems (interestingly, Hunter called the Indus script ‘Proto-Indian’). Quite a few attempts followed suit, but none could make any real progress towards a decipherment: clearly, a few similarities, however intriguing, are not enough.

Recently, Subhash Kak, whom we met a little earlier, proceeded differently: without prejudging the nature of the Harappan language, he statistically analysed the ten signs most frequently used in each script (using the text of Ashoka’s famous edicts for Brāhmī).96 Table 9.4 summarizes Kak’s results: the first three pairs are almost identical (if we turn the second, the ‘fish’, upside down, an inversion frequent enough in historical scripts); three other pairs are also excellent candidates. (Kak proposes two more, but they are less compelling in my view.) As it is, we have six strongly correlated pairs, a high proportion that militates in favour of an organic relationship between the two scripts—if they were wholly unrelated, we should find no particular likeness between their most frequently used signs. Kak goes further and tries to apply the values of the Brāhmī signs to their Harappan counterparts, but this takes us to a more complex question: Brāhmī is alphabetic, while the Indus script, in view of its large number of signs, is probably partly logographic in nature; this means that such correlations of values can only be speculative at this stage. Table 9.4. The ten most frequent signs in Indus and Brāhmī scripts, according to Subhash Kak. Finally, experts have long pointed to two important structural features of the Indus script: its use of composite signs and modifiers (Fig. 9.18), which respectively call to mind the use of composite letters and diacritical marks in Brāhmī to denote vowels (just as in later Indian scripts). If the Indus script is

unrelated to the Brāhmī, we will once again have to invoke a rather remarkable double coincidence. While preferring the dominant view on the Semitic origin of Brāhmī, the epigraphist Richard Salomon was prudent enough to point out that ‘some historical connection between the Indus Valley script and Brāhmī cannot decisively be ruled out’.97 Dilip Chakrabarti is more positive: It may not be illogical to think that the Indus writing tradition lingered on in perishable medium till the dictates of the new socio-economic contexts of early historic India led to its resurgence in a changed form.98 This was also the opinion of India’s greatest epigraphist of the twentieth century, D.C. Sircar, who wrote in 1953: ‘The ancient [Indus] writing . . . may have ultimately developed into the Brāhmī alphabet several centuries before the rise of the Mauryas in the latter half of the four century BC.’99 True, the survival of elements of the Indus script and their evolution towards Brāhmī can only be proved once the script is deciphered, or if more missing links between the two come to light; until then, however, there is no reason to accept as final a verdict of complete disappearance of the former and sudden appearance of the latter. CHANGE IN CONTINUITY What we have seen so far constitutes only a small part of the material aspects of the Harappan legacy. Of course, the historical age threw up its own innovations, from iron technology to new architectural concepts and an efflorescence of art forms. But given the disintegration of Harappan urbanism and the ensuing millennium-long reorganization, it is no one’s case that Harappan culture lived on unchanged: what has been gaining acceptance in recent decades is rather the overarching concept of ‘change in continuity’, which does justice to the situation. As J.-F. Jarrige puts it, ‘from the Neolithic time till almost today there has never been, in spite of spectacular changes in the course of time, a definite gap or break in the history of the subcontinent.’100 D.P. Agrawal sums up the situation with these words:

It is strange but true that the type and style of bangles that women wear in Rajasthan today, or the vermilion that they apply on the parting of the hair on the head, the practice of Yoga, the binary system of weights and measures, the basic architecture of the houses etc. can all be traced back to the Indus Civilisation. The cultural and religious traditions of the Harappans provide the substratum for the latter-day Indian Civilisation.101 Let us now turn to these ‘cultural and religious traditions’ and see how much of a ‘substratum’ we find in them.

{10} The Intangible Heritage Beginning with Marshall, many archaeologists and scholars have drawn parallels between traits of Harappan religion and culture and those of later, classical India. At times, subtle considerations make one feel that a certain ‘Indianness’ is at play. We saw, for example, how Jarrige noted the absence of a royal iconography in the Indus world to be ‘already an Indian trait’, or how Wright detected in Harappan society a ‘community-related organization’, which is in tune with the later common Indian pattern. When we combine such traits with the parallels noted earlier in the fields of architecture (fortifications, the absence of palaces, etc.) and governance (multiple kingdoms or city-states), the sense of a thread running through these two ages becomes inescapable. Suggestive as this approach may be, there is much more to be said on the intangible aspect of the archaeological record. In the following pages, I will supplement the work of many scholars with my own research in the field. SYMBOLS Symbols and motifs conveniently bridge the gap between the tangible and the intangible: their survival is easy to document, but the concepts they illustrate are often debatable. The most obvious example is perhaps the symbol known as the ‘swastika’ (Fig. 10.1), incised on hundreds of Harappan tablets, generally single but occasionally double (and with no preferred direction, let it be added to answer a frequent question). The swastika continues to be depicted

on pottery at several early historical sites,1 on punch-marked coins, on some of Ashoka’s edicts and other early inscriptions,2 where it symbolizes auspiciousness, harmony and growth. We cannot be sure whether it had the same significance for the Harappans, though that is not unlikely. At any rate, its graphic survival is beyond question. Another typical Harappan symbol is the ‘endless knot’ (Fig. 10.2): it reappears unchanged in Gujarat in several inscriptions of the ninth century CE, and can still be seen today in some of the rangolis (or kolams in South India) drawn by Hindu women in front of their houses, where it often represents the child Krishna’s footprint. The motif of ‘intersecting circles’ is a frequent one on Harappan pottery, also found on floor tiles at Balakot and Kalibangan (Fig. 7.4), some 800 km apart. Dilip Chakrabarti points out that ‘an identical design occurs on top of the Boddhi throne’4 at Bodh Gaya, which dates from the third century BCE, some two millennia later. About three-quarters of all Indus seals depict a single-horned bull-like creature generally called a ‘unicorn’. Almost invariably, this majestic animal faces a ‘ritual stand’ (Fig. 10.14) whose enigmatic significance has been much debated: Marshall saw in it an incense burner while, more recently, I. Mahadevan closely argued in favour of a sacred filter for Soma, the Vedic elixir.5 Regardless of the symbol’s actual significance, Mahadevan showed that the stand itself, or an object resembling it, was portrayed on historical coins, with a bull or an elephant facing it,6 and this important case of continuity has been generally accepted. Fabri, as we saw in the preceding chapter, had also pointed to one such instance (Fig. 9.15). I must add that some of the cups used in Vedic rituals for the offering of libations have a curiously similar shape.7 A host of other symbols are common to Indus seals or pottery and punch- marked coins or other historical artefacts: concentric circles, the hollow cross, the tree on a raised platform or enclosure (‘tree in railing’, Fig. 10.3), the fish, the peacock, the antelope . . .

Also the pipal leaf, and the tree itself, regarded as sacred in the Vedas, where it is called ashvattha;8 it continues to be revered as the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha attained illumination, and remains among the most sacred trees in India today. ART AND ICONOGRAPHY Harappan art is disappointingly frugal if we compare it with that of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia or ancient China; at times one wonders if the motto of the Harappan artists was ‘Small is beautiful’! Their artistic ability is beyond question, as the exquisite jewellery or the carefully incised seals demonstrate; but the small scale of most artefacts and their limited output does contrast rather glaringly with the artistic exuberance of classical India. (Of course, wood carving, painting on cloth and other art forms dependent on perishable material disappeared forever, leaving us with a truncated view of Harappan art.) Despite these limitations, we have unmistakable examples of transmission of artistic concepts to the historical period: classical art motifs frequently evoke Harappan ones. Such is the case with the most famous Indus seal (Fig. 10.4): the ‘Pashupati’ seal found at Mohenjo-daro, so called by Marshall because he saw in it the ‘Lord of the Beasts’ (pashupati) of Vedic literature. Let us momentarily leave aside that interpretation and concentrate on the iconography. At the centre is an impressive figure seated in a yogic posture on a low platform; it strikes any Indian eye as being familiar: it is a common motif in Buddhist* and Jain iconography, and Shiva is also often represented in the same posture. The god—he must be one, since he is reproduced on many seals and tablets—has three faces, heralding the depiction of three-headed Hindu gods (such as the trimūrti). His tricorn headdress is also not unfamiliar: it evokes classical symbols such as the nandipada or the triratna common in Buddhist art (at Bharhut and Sanchi

for instance), and is depicted on punch-marked coins, as T.G. Aravamuthan pointed out in 1942.10 Next to the mythical unicorn, a majestic bull, generally humped, is among the animals frequently depicted on Indus seals (Fig. 10.5), and must have been an object of special reverence. Many scholars have seen in it a precursor of Nandi, Shiva’s mount. In the Harappan statuary, a category of figurines represents what archaeologists have identified as a mother goddess, basing themselves on the heavy ornamentation of most figurines (Fig. 10.6, left), and also on a pair of pannierlike cups on both sides of the head, which were used as oil lamps (as proved by stains of soot). Curiously, statuettes of the mother goddess made two millennia later, in Mauryan times (Fig. 10.6, right), often bear similar traits: both have the same extravagant wreath of large flowers around the face, the same double necklace (the lower one with a pendant), a similar girdle, often a short skirt, sometimes also similar huge earrings.11 Stylistic considerations apart, the chief difference between the two is the loss of the side cups (although it appears that they are preserved in some traditional Gujarati art); the fan-shaped headdress is also gone, but other historical figurines still display it.12 Another Harappan deity is a kind of female ‘centaur’ (Fig. 10.7); it is striking that the same concept reappears in classical Hindu art in the form of the kinnarī or gandharvī. Finally, a standing Harappan god often appears between two open branches of a pipal tree; on some of the tablets the branches close up at the top and we have a full arch, plainly a device intended to exalt the god (Fig. 10.8). The same device is used in classical art, where an arch surrounds a seated Buddha13 or a standing Shiva, enhancing their glory. It could be objected that in none of the above cases do we have an unbroken chain of transmission from Harappan times—we rather have a chain of missing links!—and that these parallels may, in reality, be nothing

more than independent artistic creations occasionally coming up with similar concepts. The objection is theoretically valid, but in practice, there is little likelihood that such a variety of highly specific iconographic devices could have had wholly independent origins. And it is precisely the totality of these devices of Harappan art that gives it an intangible yet unmistakable air of ‘Indianness’: thus Stella Kramrish, one of the most distinguished experts on Indian art, felt that ‘in certain respects some of the Mohenjo-daro figurines can be compared with the work by village potters and women made to this day in Bengal’.14 At a more formal level, she was convinced that ‘the beautiful Maurya sculpture presupposes continuity in the artistic traditions since the Harappa period’.15 The French Vedic scholar Jean Varenne also noted how ‘several of these [Harappan] themes (figures seated in the “lotus posture”, mythical animals, celebration of dance) appear as constants in Indian art’.16 Harappan art holds occasional surprises. At Lothal, S.R. Rao17 found two pottery sherds which appear to narrate folk tales well known to many Indian grandmothers: in one of them (Fig. 10.9), two crows perched high on a tree hold fishes in their beaks while a fox-like animal below seems to be craftily concocting some way to get at that succulent food. La Fontaine, who attributed the origin of his Fables to India, would have been surprised to learn that ‘the Crow and the Fox’ was a 4500-year-old tale—with the fish turning into cheese somewhere between the protohistoric Gulf of Khambat and the elegant salons of seventeenth-century French literary circles . . . RELIGIOUS LIFE The religious life of the Harappans has often been the object of comparisons with later Indian religions, at both the external level of customs and traditions and the conceptual level reflected in Vedic and post- Vedic literature. Here also, archaeologists and scholars of religion have broadly concurred that a Harappan ‘substratum’ remains perceptible, but there is much disagreement regarding the mechanism of transmission.

Before we discuss this, let us survey objectively the salient parallels in the field. An easy method would be to transport a Hindu villager of today to a Harappan city. He would perhaps first note the importance of cleanliness in daily life and observe, in accordance with archaeologists, that beyond mere hygiene, ritual purification through water was a trait of Harappan religion as it is of later Indian religions;18 he would marvel at such ceremonies as the Great Bath and would not miss the structure’s obvious likeness to the ritual bathing tanks of later Hindu temples.19 He might mingle with a religious procession through the streets of Mohenjo-daro (a few tablets depict such events20), and watch as oil lamps are lit and libations poured with conch shells (whose mouths were sawn open), or as priests blow through their conches (whose tips were sawn off) to announce a holy moment or invoke a god.21 He would feel at home with sacred symbols like the swastika, the pipal leaf or an occasional trident (trishūla), and would find that some lingas have much the same shape as those in his village temple (Fig. 10.10). The worship of the pipal tree or of a mother goddess would surprise him in no way. Our villager’s experience might be best summarized by John Marshall’s stimulating observation made in 1931: Taken as a whole, [the Indus Valley people’s] religion is so characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism.22 But commonalities do not stop with the folk aspect of religion; they run deeper, and despite the general opinion (including Marshall’s) that Indus culture is ‘pre-Aryan’ and therefore non-Vedic, it is tempting to probe the Vedic texts for echoes of themes evoked on Harappan seals and tablets. Harappan gods and goddesses have been the objects of numerous studies, most of them partly speculative in nature: since the script remains mute, their pictorial representations alone guide us. The bull (Fig. 10.5), for instance, is omnipresent on Harappan seals and pottery, and it is also the animal that the Rig Veda exalts above all others: great gods such as Indra or Agni are frequently lauded as ‘the Bull’ in an obvious symbol of might.

Harappan figurines depict a mother goddess often enough, and again the Vedic hymns implore various aspects of the Mother : Sarasvatī, Ushas, Ilā, Aditi, Prithivī, Bhāratī . . . But such parallels, though interesting, are inconclusive, since both the bull and the mother goddess were worshipped in many other ancient cultures. In central India, for instance, the cult of a mother goddess is attested as early as 8000 or 9000 BCE!23 The issue is, therefore, whether we can establish stronger connections resting on a group of specific traits. PROTO-SHIVA AND THE BUFFALO Let us return to the ‘Pashupati’ seal (Fig. 10.4). Four wild creatures in the background—tiger, buffalo, elephant and rhinoceros—appear dwarfed by the imposing god seated at the centre in a yogic posture, who indisputably exudes a powerful sense of mastery. His three faces gaze to the left, ahead, and to the right. Marshall saw in him a ‘proto-Shiva’ because one of the latter’s names is Pashupati or ‘lord of the beasts’. I believe that he was basically right in his identification, but for the wrong reason: the term ‘Pashupati’, which appears in the Yajur and Atharva Veda as a name of Rudra, applies to cattle (pashu) rather than wild beasts.† But in a series of praises of Soma, the divine nectar, the Rig Veda presents the striking image of a ‘Buffalo of wild beasts’24 (mahisho mrigānām), a designation that seems to suit this godhead wearing buffalo horns and surrounded by wild beasts. Moreover, in the Veda, Soma is often associated with Rudra,25 sometimes even fused with him,26 and Rudra is Shiva’s terrible form. If we remember that Shiva is also Yogīshvar, Yoganāth, that is, the ‘lord of yoga’, as well as Mahākāleshwar, the lord of Time—represented on the seal, I suggest, by the three faces for past, present and future—this impressive seal from Mohenjo-daro presents us with a series of concepts and attributes consonant with those classically associated with Shiva. This identification finds further support in the symbol of the trishūla, which the head-dress, as a whole, evokes; the trident is independently

depicted on a few seals, and is one of the signs of the Indus writing system. Finally, we have just seen the presence of linga-shaped objects of worship. Altogether, the evidence of the cult of a Shiva-like (‘proto’ or not) deity in the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization does build up into a consistent whole. As an aside, I must disagree with Marshall and other scholars who labelled Shiva a ‘Dravidian’ god, since Shiva first appears in the Rig Veda as Rudra and in the Yajur Veda under his own name.27 Also, in an attempt to connect the seal’s deity with some hypothetical ‘pre-Aryan’ phallus worship, several scholars have described him as ithyphallic, but that is doubtful: what appears to be an erect phallus is more likely the folds of a loin cloth; other seals of the same god in the same posture (Fig. 10.11) confirm this. A few other scenes evoke familiar themes. A motif encountered on several tablets is that of the slaying of a buffalo. In a two-sided moulded tablet found at Harappa a few years ago (Fig. 10.12),28 one side depicts a figure pinning the buffalo down with his leg and spearing him, while another figure seated in a yogic posture looks on, wearing a tricorn head-dress—clearly our ‘proto-Shiva’ again, and a presence that lends a ritual dimension to the slaying (as does the fact that this is one of the very rare ‘violent’ scenes depicted on the Indus seals). The Veda alludes to the sacrifice of a buffalo,29 but as many scholars have remarked, this Harappan motif rather calls to mind that of goddess Durga slaying the buffalo-demon Mahishāsura. This theme likely has Harappan origins, although a more diffused origin cannot be ruled out (the Todas of the Nilgiris, for instance, practise the ritual sacrifice of the buffalo, though not through spearing). Another seal, often called the ‘Divine Adoration’ seal (Fig. 10.13), narrates a ritual that has been the object of many differing interpretations. The figure standing between two branches of a pipal tree and the kneeling figure wear an identical tricorn head-dress and plait of hair: could they be one and the same? Are the seven figures at the bottom female (the seven

mothers) or male (the seven rishis)? Is the noble-looking, human-faced ram being led to sacrifice, or does it stand for another deity? Could the object on the stool, which appears to have two hair buns on the side, be a human head? Or does its arched handle point to a kamandalu? There are no easy answers to these questions, but we do find the worshipper’s physical attitude precisely described in the Rig Veda: thus the poet prays ‘with uplifted hands’30 or with ‘bended knees’;31 Agni is to be approached ‘kneeling with adoration’,32 and so are Indra33 and Sarasvatī.34 On a seal from Chanhu-daro, we witness an unusual scene: a gaur (the Indian ‘bison’) with a human-like face mates with a woman lying supine, from whose head a plant emerges.35 As Raymond and Bridget Allchin point out, this motif ‘may be compared with the Vedic theme of the union of heaven and earth (dyavaprithivi), the latter represented as the Earth Mother (mata bhumi) and the former by the bull of heaven (dyaur me pita)’.36 Indeed, throughout the Rig Veda, heaven and earth constitute a constant couple, representing our ‘father and mother’,37 as it were, sometimes fused into a single deity;38 and an important hymn39 entreats God Parjanya as the Bull to ‘deposit his seed in the plants’, in an almost perfect evocation of the seal’s motif (including the gaur’s human face). THE UNICORN No attempt to make sense of themes depicted on Indus seals can afford to ignore the unicorn motif (Fig. 10.14). What could be its significance? And if it bears some relation with Vedic symbolism, why is the unicorn absent from classical iconography? The bull, elephant and buffalo perdure, but not this graceful one-horned creature. Nevertheless, the notion of a ‘unicorn’ does not end with Harappan culture : in later Hindu mythology, Vishnu’s first avatar, the fish who saves Manu when the Great Flood engulfs the earth, wears a single horn on his head, to which Manu ties his boat. Also, as the historian A.D. Pusalker40 noted long ago, another avatar of Vishnu, Varāha or the Boar, is sometimes called ekashringa or ‘one-horned’. In the Mahābhārata, Krishna himself

expounds to Arjuna a long list of his incarnations and names; coming to the same avatar, he says, ‘Assuming, in days of old, the form of a boar with a single tusk . . . I raised the submerged Earth from the bottom of the ocean. From this reason am I called by the name of Ekasringa.’41 The motif of a one-horned deity is therefore not foreign to Hindu mythology. But to my mind, it is again the Rig Veda that helps us most here. Harappans depicted horned tigers, horned serpents and horned composite animals, and many Vedic deities have one, two, three, four horns (or more!). In the Veda, the horn is more than a mere glorifying device : thus Agni or Indra destroys the enemy’s den ‘like a bull with sharpened horn’;42 Soma, also likened to a bull, ‘brandishes his horns on high and whets them’.43 The horn (shringa) is not always mentioned explicitly: thus Indra is ‘like a bull who sharpens [his horns]’44 or tears his enemies apart ‘like a sharp bull’.45 Moreover, Indra’s weapon is the vajra or thunderbolt, which he ‘whets for sharpness, as a bull [whets his horns]’;46 it is a ‘sharpened’ weapon.47 Thunderbolt or horn, therefore, has the same function—that of the aggressive, pointed divine power concentrated on a hostile point. Obligingly, as often, the Rig Veda gives us the key to its own symbolism : it describes Savitar, the sun god, as ‘spreading his horn of truth’48—ritasya shringa, with ‘ritam’ signifying ‘truth’ or the ‘cosmic order’, the Rig Vedic antecedent of dharma. If one were to create an iconography for this whole symbolism, it would be hard to think of a better one than the unicorn. Moreover, the Rig Veda compares the Maruts (a family of violent gods) to bulls whose horn is ‘uplifted unto the highest’,49 just as we see on the seals.‡ Even the invariably double or S-shaped curve of the unicorn’s horn, executed so carefully that it must have a precise meaning (the bulls’ horns, by contrast, have a single curve), could be explained within the same Vedic imagery, as a means to represent in a compact space the ‘hundred joints’ of Indra’s thunderbolt.50 That the unicorn actually stood for Indra in the eyes of Harappans cannot be proved, but its affinity with the Vedic concepts of a mighty bull with a

sharpened horn certainly calls for attention. FIRE WORSHIP Two more elements of Harappan culture throw important bridges across the ‘Vedic Night’. The first is fire worship, evidenced by a few altars that have come to light in Harappan cities. We have already seen (Fig. 7.2) the peculiar apsidal altar on Banawali’s acropolis, itself enclosed within an apsidal structure. When it was uncovered towards the end of the partial excavations at this site, R.S. Bisht noted that the altar ‘was full of fine loose ash’;51 a large jar was found in the structure. Seven years ago, Banawali’s altar came on the screen as I showed slides of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization to venerable Vedic scholars assembled in a field at Pañjal, in Kerala.52 Some of them, masters of one or several of the Vedas, interrupted me to point out that the semi- circular shape is one of the three basic shapes of fire altars (called dakshināgni), with the other two being the square (āhavanīya) and the circle (gārhapatya); the three could be seen on the grounds of the conference, and are still in use in various ceremonies.53 (They are visible inside the enclosure to the west of the mahāvedi, see Fig. 9.4, Nos 2, 3 and 4). While those Vedic scholars of Kerala recognized in the Banawali structure a fire altar, Bisht reached a similar conviction independently: to him, this clearly non-utilitarian structure enclosing an altar with layers of ashes could only be a temple dedicated to fire rituals. Further down the Sarasvatī, at Kalibangan, we already visited a series of seven altars located atop a brick platform on the southern side of the acropolis (p. 160). Sceptics suggested that this could be a community kitchen, with the central steles acting as base for the pots,54 but this is unlikely for several reasons. One, generally kitchen ovens or hearths used for cooking had a lateral opening for the insertion of firewood, but that is not the case for Kalibangan’s seven altars. Two, the central steles, with diameters of 10 to 15 cm, are too slender to support pots. Three, here again the altars contained ashes (with some charcoal), but no bone remains55 as

one would expect from domestic hearths, since we know that Harappans were non-vegetarian. The scales are thus clearly tipped in favour of some fire ritual. Such altars were also found in some individual houses of Kalibangan’s lower city; further east, outside the fortified lower city, a small but badly eroded mound produced a unique complex of altars—neither apsidal nor rectangular, but more or less circular this time: a large altar, over 2.5 m in diameter, was irregularly surrounded by five small ones, all of them containing ash and terracotta cakes. Noting the presence of altars on Kalibangan’s three mounds, Raymond Allchin remarked, ‘These three contexts suggest that fire rituals formed a part of the religious life of the town, at a civic, domestic and popular level.’56 Moving to Saurashtra, Lothal yielded similar structures not only of an oval shape, but also a few square ones too. Here also, the excavator S.R. Rao concluded that the latter could not have been kitchen hearths: among other reasons, they are much too large (about 2.7 m square) and some were located right on the street.57 One of them (Fig. 10.15) showed depressions in the top row of bricks, probably designed to hold vessels in place, and a post hole in a corner. But it also offered three strong clues to the Vedic fire ritual. A fine painted jar of terracotta with a broad mouth was placed against the altar; a few steps away, a terracotta ladle58 was found, with blackened edges and bottom pointing to contact with fire. It would have been the right instrument for making offerings to the fire of oil, milk and clarified butter drawn from the jar. (Incidentally, both sacrificial jar and ladle figure in the Vedas in association with the constant theme of libation.) The third clue emerges from a comparison with the Shulbasūtras, ancient technical texts that I briefly invoked in relation to the proportions of the mahāvedi; they give elaborate geometrical instructions on the construction of altars of various shapes—falcon, tortoise, wheel, or a simple square. The last has, on one side, a small platform jutting out, called the ‘handle’ of the altar (Fig. 10.16). Lothal’s structure is about half the size of the Shulbasūtras’ square altar, but surprisingly, on one side, it has a small

platform which looks very much like the ‘handle’. Moreover, the length of the platform is one-fourth of the altar’s side—exactly as with the Shulbasūtras’ square altar.59 The ‘coincidence’ is intriguing, to say the least, and while the Shulbasūtras belong to a later age, some of the concepts they articulate appear to have originated in the Harappan tradition. At any rate, if Lothal’s structure, located on one of the town’s main streets, with its platform, jar and ladle, was not a fire altar, no better explanation has been proposed so far. Such fire structures have been reported from other Indian sites, such as Nageshwar, Vagad (both in Gujarat) and Rakhigarhi,60 but not from Mohenjo-daro or Harappa. (At Mohenjo-daro, archaeologists have occasionally identified one or another building with a temple,61 but there are no clues as to the exact type of worship conducted in them.) It may be that fire worship was only practised in the Sarasvatī Valley (Banawali, Rakhigarhi, Kalibangan) and in Gujarat. Conversely, mother-goddess figurines are common in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa but rare in the Sarasvatī region. Pending more extensive excavations, it is legitimate to assume a certain regionalization of the Harappan religion: it was not uniform but allowed for ‘diversity of practice’,62 as Possehl puts it. The presence of fire worship in the Sarasvatī region and in Gujarat has generated a good deal of interest as well as disbelief: not all scholars have accepted it as readily as Allchin, Lal, Rao or Joshi. The reason for such scepticism is plain enough: in the Indian context, fire worship conjures up Vedic culture. YOGA So does another Harappan practice, which has caused a lot of scholarly ink to flow. The impressive ‘proto-Shiva’ is seated in such a way that he rests on his toes with the two heels in contact; several more seals and tablets represent a figure—very likely the same ‘proto-Shiva’—seated in the same manner on a low platform or pedestal. This posture has sometimes been

wrongly identified as padmāsana, for in the lotus posture, the legs are crossed, which is not the case here. At least two scholars—T. McEvilley63 and Yan Y. Dhyansky64—went into minute detail to establish that this posture is the classical mūlabandhāsana, a difficult āsana whose function is to help awaken the kundalinī. Besides, at Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and Lothal, excavators found figurines in different postures recalling other āsanas.65 A striking example from Harappa (Fig. 10.17) shows a man seated cross-legged with his hands joined in the traditional Indian namaste: an average Indian would be hard put to decide whether it was made 4500 years ago or yesterday! Even more arresting is the famous ‘priest-king’ (Fig. 10.18). At the time of its discovery at Mohenjo-daro, it was often speculated that, as in Mesopotamia, the city must have been governed by a class of ‘priest-kings’; with no evidence in support of this hypothesis, it was gradually abandoned, but the label stuck to the statuette. This impressive personage has also been compared to figurines from Bactria on stylistic grounds,66 but even if one admits some likeness, there is a fundamental difference : as early as in 1929, the Indian archaeologist Ramaprasad Chanda pointed out that the figure’s ‘half-shut eyes looking fixedly at the tip of the nose’67 signified a distinctly Indian trait not to be found anywhere else, which suggested specific techniques of meditation. In other words, our ‘priest-king’ is deep in contemplation—an attitude not known to be attached to kings or priests, especially of the Mesopotamian sort: as Wheeler noted, ‘the fixed Mesopotamian stare is very different from the contemplative expression of the Indus faces’.68 Though quite unlike the powerful god with a tricorn head-dress, our personage is part of the same cultural complex of yoga, if we take the word in its central sense of inner exploration and mastery. Dilip Chakrabarti refers to him as a ‘Shramana’ (ascetic) or a ‘sacred person’,69 certainly a better description than that of a priest or a king.

It is often claimed that there is no notion of yoga in the Rig Veda, and that the concept of a ‘Harappan yoga’, if admitted, can still be pre-Vedic. But while the Rig Veda does not use the term ‘yoga’, it asks for our thoughts to be harnessed or yoked to a higher consciousness: The illumined yoke their mind and they yoke their thoughts to the illumined godhead, to the vast, to the luminous in consciousness.70 In many hymns (as, later, in the Bhagavad Gītā), the metaphor of the well-yoked chariot transparently stands for mastery over the instrument: horses are ‘yoked by thought’71 or ‘yoked by prayer’72 to the chariot.§ Central to the Rig Veda’s quest for immortality is the effort to release Agni, the divine fire ‘who dwells in creatures, in whom all creatures dwell, [but who] is hidden within mortals by hostile powers’.73 There would be much more to say on the spiritual pursuit of the Rig Vedic rishis, but while it is couched in a language very different from that of the Upanishads, its goal and methods are the same.74 If ‘Yoga was present in India five thousand years ago’,75 as Dhyansky concludes in his paper entitled ‘The Indus Valley Origin of a Yoga Practice’, there is no need to invoke some unknown and unverifiable ‘pre- Vedic’ tradition. LIFE AND DEATH Harappan funerary practices were of several types. Some of the dead were buried in earthen graves often lined with bricks, their heads generally to the north, the direction used today during cremation (since the feet should point southward, towards Yama’s realm). Some were buried in wooden coffins, but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule; whether they were rulers, high officials or high priests we may never know, although the last is not unlikely in the case of a few skeletons wearing necklaces of beads and various amulets. Some burials were symbolic ones containing grave offerings with no bones. Other modes of burial, in big urns devoid of bones, may have involved cremation, and since the overall number of graves only

accounts for a fraction of the population, cremation is often believed to have been practised by the lower strata of the society at least. Even if the graves were reserved for an elite, they were quite plain in comparison with the sumptuous royal tombs of ancient Egypt: nothing marked them out in the landscape, and an assortment of pots of various sizes and shapes was all that accompanied the dead, along with a few personal objects (beads, rings, bangles or copper mirrors)—there was no gold, no frescoes, no decorated sarcophagus, nothing to cause awe in the grave’s discoverer. Several archaeologists have pointed out that this restraint may hold a message: Harappans did respect their dead, but did not believe in glorifying them. To ancient Egyptians, there was eternal life after death; pharaohs and members of the social elite therefore had to be suitably ‘equipped’ with every possible luxury. In contrast, if Harappans did believe in some afterlife, as the grave offerings show, they preferred to keep their wealth in circulation, favouring life over death—that is, indeed, a characteristic Indian attitude. Another approach comes from D.D. Kosambi, who drew attention to a funerary urn at Harappa (the Cemetery H phase) : on it is painted a peacock with a circular body, inside which can be seen a recumbent human figure (Fig. 10.19). Kosambi found here a parallel to the Mahābhārata’s reference to the dead ‘having been eaten by birds and insects of various sorts, but specifically by peacocks’.76 I may add that a Rig Vedic hymn, which speaks of ‘a glory beyond this realm’ to which we pass through old age, mentions ‘man-consuming birds’77 in the very next verse. A bird was also sculpted on the lid of a terracotta pot in one of the graves at the recently discovered Harappan site of Sanauli, a few kilometres east of the Yamuna. This unique site turned out to be an extensive burial ground: 116 graves have so far been excavated, and the full extent of the cemetery is thought to be some four hectares, prompting the excavators to call it a ‘necropolis’.78 They felt tempted to correlate some of the unique artefacts and burial modes that came to light in Vedic literature, but more research is needed to put this on a sound footing. Meanwhile, we should note the

discovery of an oblong trough of clay: its vitrified inner walls and the presence of ash and charred human bones point to cremation, perhaps the first direct evidence of the practice. VEDIC VS HARAPPAN There are other, subtler threads connecting the two civilizations of early India, or bridging the Harappan and Vedic cultures. We noted earlier the community-based distribution of power (and, probably, functions) in Harappan society, a culture of ‘unity in diversity’, and the absence of glorified rulers—traits equally visible in the early stages of the Ganges civilization. On an ethical level, the four classical goals of life—dharma (the cosmic and individual order), artha (wealth), kāma (pleasures) and moksha (liberation)—constituted the cultural foundation of historical India; referring to this four-fold order, Kenoyer judiciously observes that the Indus rulers appear to have observed the first three concepts by promoting trade and wealth ‘without the extensive use of military coercion’.79 Indeed, with the just noted Harappan tradition of yoga and meditation, we are entitled to make out the presence of the fourth concept too—moksha! If we return to Dholavira’s town planning (p. 198), we can discern two important Vedic concepts at play. The first is the addition of unity, visible in the ratios (5:4 is nothing but ¼ plus one unit; 9:4 is the same plus another unit), and crucial to the calculations of fire altars in the Shulbasūtras, for instance.80 This addition to the unit of a fraction of itself represents, at a deeper level, a process of expansion, of auspicious increase symbolizing or inviting prosperity, and it becomes a standard method of generating auspicious proportions in classical Hindu architecture.81 The second Vedic concept is that of recursion or repetition of a motif, also visible in classical architecture as a way of repeating the initial unity and of growing from it.82 (In temples, shikharas of increasing height build up towards the towering last one.) At Dholavira, the ratio 5:4 found in the castle’s proportions is repeated in those of the lower town; again, the ratio 9:4, between the lengths of the ‘castle’ and the middle town, is repeated between the lengths

of the middle and the lower towns. In view of the very low margins of error, such a double repetition can only have been deliberately designed. Many more meeting points between Harappan and Vedic cultures have been proposed right from the 1920s onwards.83 But scholars have proposed widely divergent explanations to account for them. At one end of the spectrum, Asko Parpola, a Finnish Sanskritist, has been a strong advocate of the theory that Harappans were Dravidian speakers (a theory first propounded by Marshall). His well-known work on the Indus script is essentially based on Dravidian readings; if it has not gained acceptance, it is mostly because it could make no headway beyond a few seals. But it is fascinating to note how, in order to explain Harappan motifs, Parpola takes constant recourse to Vedic and classical Hindu, Buddhist and Jain concepts and themes. For example, he parallels Kalibangan’s row of seven fire altars with the seven altars within the mahāvedi of the Vedic Soma sacrifice (Fig. 9.4).84 He gives a fairly central place to the ‘Dravidian’ god Murugan, but correlates him with Harappan symbols through the Vedic god Rudra and other elements of Sanskrit literature. His reading of the iconography of the ‘Divine Adoration’ seal (Fig. 10.13) draws on the Brāhmanas, Purānas, the two epics and a traditional sacrifice to Durga; it weaves an entire symbolism around the constellation of Rohini (which holds an important place in early Vedic literature) and sees in the seven standing figures at the bottom of the seals the ‘seven mothers’ or else the seven wives of the rishis and, therefore, the Pleiades (Krittikā). None of this is remotely ‘Dravidian’! We saw earlier how I. Mahadevan, who has also proposed Dravidian readings of a few seals, interpreted the ritual stand placed in front of the unicorn as a sacred filter for Soma—the extraction, filtering and consumption of which form a core theme of the Rig Veda. How do such scholars reconcile the apparent contradiction between a supposedly Dravidian-speaking population and important Vedic cultural themes? They do so simply by assuming that all these components of Harappan religion and mythology were somehow ‘borrowed’ from the Late

Harappans by the freshly arrived Aryans, who then integrated them in their Vedic literature. At the other end of the spectrum, we meet archaeologists who see no need for such a device, finding no trace of the Aryans’ arrival on the ground, and who therefore prefer to equate the Harappan with the Vedic. Dholavira’s excavator R.S. Bisht, for instance, finds that the city’s upper, middle and lower towns ‘temptingly sound analogous to three interesting terms in the Rig-Veda, viz., “parama” [upper], “madhyama” [middle] and “avama” [lower] . . .’85 ‘In the tripartite divisions of the Harappan city of Dholavira,’ he claims, ‘we find what the Vedic seers were trying to conceive of in supernatural and divine world’.86 Bisht also extracts from hundreds of passages of the Rig Veda numerous terms for villages and towns, fortifications, houses of various types, rooms, even doorways—a rich material vocabulary that belies the conventional view of early Vedic people as ‘pastoral’ or ‘nomadic’, and ignorant of anything remotely resembling city life. A few years ago, the scholar Bhagwan Singh went further and listed hundreds of Rig Vedic words related to trade, industry, etc.87 Even if one may often hesitate to accept his interpretations, as I do, once again the sheer diversity of the vocabulary is puzzling. In the field of governance, for instance, B.B. Lal asks, ‘What do we do with terms like rājan, samrāt, janarāj, rāstra, Samiti, sabhā, adhyaksa, etc. occurring in the Vedic texts, which clearly refer to categories of rulers, assemblies, etc.?’88 The spacious assembly halls at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa come to mind. Opposing such a perspective is the dominant view that the Rig Veda, apart from reflecting a non-urban environment, knows the horse (which is absent from Harappan iconography), but not writing (known to Harappans), and that linguistic considerations prevent us from dating the Rig Veda beyond the middle of the second millennium BCE. The debate—which is inextricably linked with the Aryan invasion or migration theory—has been raging for eight decades, and is not likely to end soon. It has generated a copious literature, including a few wide-ranging studies highlighting the complexity of the issue, and bringing in new disciplines such as

anthropology, genetics and astronomy.89 A growing number of participants in the debate (myself included) have argued that the stark contrast between the Harappan and the Vedic, proposed by linguists, historians and other scholars, remains rooted in colonial misconceptions and misreadings of the Vedic texts. At the same time, it is fair to stress that there are complexities and potential pitfalls in trying to equate a popular culture, such as the Harappan, with a textual one, such as the Vedic. But my purpose in this chapter and the preceding one was not to enter into that labyrinthine debate; it was limited to offering a glimpse of the overall legacy of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization: in whatever way we may wish to explain it, a manifold cultural continuum emerges between the Indus and the Ganges civilizations. As Lal puts it: Even today there is no walk of life in which we cannot discern the grass-roots features of this ancient [Harappan] civilization : be it agriculture, cooking habits, arts, crafts, games, ornaments, toiletry, religious practices or social stratification.90 In no way does archaeology or literature justify the picture of a tradition ‘rudely and ruthlessly interrupted by the arrival of new people from the west’, as Piggot asserted, with the fabled Aryans in mind. Nor is the Gangetic culture ‘diametrically opposed’ to the Harappan culture, as Basham would have it. As a result, the old concept of a ‘Vedic night’ throwing open a gaping chasm between the two civilizations now stands rejected. According to Kenoyer, ‘It is clear that this period of more than 700 years was not a chaotic Dark Age, but rather a time of reorganization and expansion.’91 To be precise, ‘current studies of the transition between the two early urban civilizations claim that there was no significant break or hiatus.’92 Jarrige agrees: ‘This famous vacuum that was sometimes called Vedic night . . . has been filling up more and more thanks to numerous findings.’93 In his opinion, the considerable changes that followed the end of the Indus cities are to be understood ‘within the framework of a continuity with the preceding millennia, without any radical break of the sort too often

proposed earlier’.94 Shaffer is equally categorical: ‘The previous concept of a Dark Age in South Asian archaeology is no longer valid.’95 There is, however, a crucial element of the debate that is missing here: the Sarasvatī. The lost river has been summoned as a witness, and since in between she became the goddess of vāch, or speech, she deserves a fair hearing.

{11} The Sarasvatī’s Testimony The rediscovery of the 1500 km-long bed of the Sarasvatī in the nineteenth century has far-reaching repercussions on our understanding of the origins of Indian civilization. Let us briefly survey the ground we have covered. The most ancient Indian text in our possession, the Rig Veda, reveals a keen awareness of the geography of the Northwest, an awareness expressed mostly through river names. Among them is the Sarasvatī, a mighty, impetuous river flowing ‘from the mountain to the sea’ and located between the Yamuna and the Shutudrī (Sutlej). Subsequent Vedic literature—the Mahābhārata, several Brāhmanas and Purānas among other texts—paint a consistent picture of the location, break-up and recession of the river. As a matter of fact, when nineteenth-century British officials explored the region, they found quite a few seasonal streams rising in the Shivalik Hills, but no major river flowing between the Yamuna and the Sutlej. They did record three things, however: a tradition that there was once a river flowing westward through the region (the ‘Lost River of the Indian Desert’); a broad, dry bed called the Ghaggar or Hakra, partly filled during strong monsoons; and, at the foot of the Shivaliks, a small stream called ‘Sarsuti’, flowing down from a tīrtha which tradition claims to be the source of the ancient Sarasvatī. In the same nineteenth century, these findings, correlated with the testimony of Sanskrit texts, convinced most Indologists that the bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra was the relic of the Sarasvatī. By the turn of the century, maps and gazetteers reflected that identification. The ‘lost river’ had been